Morning, CEO!
I consider myself a creature of habit. I like my tea hot, my code commented, and my British detective series running for at least 10 seasons.
Then I listened to Elena Verna.
Elena is a growth legend. She led growth at Dropbox, Miro, and Amplitude. She knows everything.
And yet, after joining Lovable (which hit $200M ARR in under a year), she admitted that only 30% to 40% of her decades of experience actually applies anymore.
The rest? She had to throw it in the trash.
If a growth titan has to burn her playbook, we probably should too.
Here is how Elena is navigating the chaos, and how we can steal her brain.
1. Stop Polishing the Door Handle (Optimization is Dead)
In her past lives, Elena spent 95% of her time “optimizing.”
You know the drill. Tweaking the funnel. Changing the button color from blue to slightly-more-urgent blue. Shaving 0.2 seconds off a process.
At Lovable? She says that’s a waste of time.
She now spends 95% of her time on Innovation and only 5% on Optimization.
Why? Because the market is moving too fast. If you spend six months optimizing a feature, by the time you’re done, AI has rendered that entire feature useless.
I feel attacked.
My comfort zone is optimization. I love organizing my desktop folders. I love color-coding my calendar. It feels like work, but it’s actually just “procrastination with better lighting.”
The Takeaway for Us:
Stop optimizing your current job description.
If you are an “Agency of One,” you can’t spend your day making your existing tasks 1% faster. That’s a race to the bottom because AI will eventually do those tasks 100% faster for free.
You need to ship new features.
Don’t just format the weekly report better. Build a new dashboard that predicts next week’s problems. Don’t just answer emails faster. Build an agent that drafts the answers for you.
Optimization is maintenance. Innovation is equity.
2. Your Tenure Resets Every 90 Days
Elena dropped a bomb that made me want to crawl under my weighted blanket.
She said: “You have to re-earn Product-Market Fit every three months.”
In the old days (2022), you found a fit, and then you scaled it for five years. You rode the wave.
But in AI, the underlying tech changes every quarter. User expectations skyrocket. What was “magic” in Q1 is “boring” in Q2.
If Lovable—a company growing faster than a bacterial culture in a petri dish—has to panic about relevance every 90 days, so do we.
We love the idea of “Tenure.” We think, “I’ve been here 10 years, I know where the bodies are buried, I am safe.”
Elena’s logic suggests that tenure is now a liability. It makes you slow. It makes you defend the “old way.”
The Takeaway for Us:
Your boss doesn’t care what you did in 2019.
Treat your employment contract like a renewable 3-month subscription.
Every quarter, ask yourself: “If I had to pitch my services to this company today, from scratch, would they hire me?”
If the answer is “maybe,” you are already churning.
You need to re-launch “Me Inc.” every season. New capabilities, new offers, new value.
(I know. I’m tired too. I need a nap.)
3. Hire Yourself for “Chaos Clarity”
When Elena hires for her team, she doesn’t look for people who fit a neat little box.
She looks for “High Agency” people who can “create clarity from chaos.”
She says fast-moving AI companies don’t have stable roadmaps. They don’t have instruction manuals. If you need to be told exactly what to do, you will drown.
She explicitly looks for people who don’t wait for permission.
This is the ultimate “Agency of One” mindset.
Most employees wait for the ticket. They wait for the email. They wait for the “all hands” meeting to tell them the strategy.
But in a chaotic market, the person who waits is the person who gets left behind.
Elena is saying that value is created by the people who walk into the mess, grab a shovel, and say, “I’m going to build a path right here.”
The Takeaway for Us:
Stop asking your boss for clarity. Sell them clarity.
Don’t go to them asking, “What should I do about this AI thing?”
Go to them and say, “I looked at the chaos, and here are three ways we can use AI to fix it. I’ve already started on number one.”
That is High Agency. That is how you become indispensable.
To recap:
Stop Optimizing: Polishing a dying workflow is a waste of time. Build something new.
The 90-Day Rule: Your skills have a shelf life of a banana. Refresh them constantly.
Eat Chaos for Breakfast: Don’t wait for instructions. Create clarity.
I’m going to go create some clarity (by which I mean, organize my fridge).
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